Coaching: Uniform Tips

An Inside Look at SELECT Uniforms and Equipment

June 16, 2008

By Nick Williams

Here’s a familiar scenario for a soccer coach or team manager: You order uniforms for your club, town or high school team. A few years go by and now you need more jerseys and a few replacement shorts, but most of your original stock is still in good condition.

There’s only one problem – your retailer informs you that the manufacturer has discontinued your uniform. Now instead of ordering just the jerseys, shorts and socks you needed, you’re forced to order a whole new set with money you either don’t want to spend, or even worse, don’t have.

What’s a coach or team manager to do?

Well, there is a solution. SELECT Uniforms and Equipment. Best known for its high-quality line of soccer balls, the Denmark-based brand is quickly becoming a fixture in the uniform and training apparel market. Licensed and launched by the American multi-sport company Varsity Spirit in 2003, Select Uniforms offers teams two key advantages:

1. You get to “create” your own unique uniform from a seemingly endless set of styles and colors.

2. Your SELECT customized uniform is NEVER discontinued. So you can reorder the exact same uniform years after your initial order.

“The benefit is that from now until eternity, your club, your high school squad, your college squad, doesn’t have to re-kit the whole team or the whole club because you can get fill-ins forever,” said Scott Williams, National Sales Manager for Varsity, the official licensee for the SELECT Uniform brand in the U.S. “All of our primary competitors – the brands that have dominated the soccer uniform for decades – typically discontinue a style after about three years. But if you’re a soccer club with 150, 200 players and you can’t get any fill-ins, you now have to either swap out the whole club for new kits or figure out some sort of hybrid uniform.”

“But when you order a custom uniform from us, we’ll never discontinue it,” continues Williams. “That’s the SELECT Promise, and it sets us apart from every premium soccer apparel maker on the planet.”

There are virtually no restrictions to the SELECT custom uniform line, which is a large virtual inventory accessible on their website. Once you log on, you can create and tinker with all their various uniform styles and colors, with computer images serving as a virtual showroom for your self-designed kit. You can customize your jersey, shorts, socks and outerwear. Even your numbers are customizable.

Your signature uniform will come out exactly as you want it and, best of all, will remain in SELECT’s inventory permanently, allowing you to concentrate on what really matters to you: the game.

“The SELECT ‘Yours – Forever’ promise takes a lot of worry and pressure off me,” said Mark Bowman, the Woodcreek Timberwolves (California) girls’ varsity coach. “All I have to do is call my representative and say, ‘I have to replace some jerseys or shorts,’ and then I can get back to doing what matters – coaching the team, getting ready for the upcoming season.”

“From socks to jerseys, when I see teams that are all mixed up, because of replacement issues, it just doesn’t look very respectable,” Bowman says. “With SELECT, we look great, and we know we’ll always look great.”

Williams agrees, but he said that’s not the only reason why he thinks people enjoy SELECT’s products.

“Teams want a uniform so unusual," he said, "that everybody knows that’s who it is when they go play them.”

One of those teams is Brilla FC.

“With SELECT uniforms, we’ve chosen a color mix that’s really unique to our area: sky blue and navy. Around here, there are no other teams like that,” said Scott Taylor, Director of Soccer Operations for the Mississippi-based club. “People know who we are at first sight. They point and say, ‘That’s definitely Brilla.’”

Williams, who has been with Varsity since the original launch of SELECT line in the U.S., stressed that the “Yours – Forever” policy synchs perfectly with the company’s view toward customer relations, namely that they’ll always be there for the customer.

“When you work with us you deal with a company that’s professional, that cares about the relationship with you, that cares about the game, that’s interested in creating a relationship that’s win-win,” he said. “We think we have product that’s good value for your dollar. We treat people fairly and you deal directly with someone that works for us.”

“When you call us, you talk to a real person. When you email us someone gets back to you in 24 hours or less. The relationship we have with you really matters to us.”

To learn more about SELECT, or to check out their custom uniform program, visit www.selectgear.com.